Jesus, Keep Me Near The Cross:

I’ve really fallen in love with the old Hymn named above.  It was originally written by a lady named Fanny Crosby.  Which shows just how much times have changed in that you could name a child Fanny and they wouldn’t be teased into catatonia before second grade.  It was a kinder and gentler time.

She also apparently wrote every hymn, ever.  No, seriously she wrote some 8,000 odd hymns in her life.  And, it’s cool if you try to count them all and seem to come up short, she used a bunch of pen names to keep the man from holding her down.  Oh, did I mention that she did all this while being blind from birth?  Yeah, that’s making me depressed, I’ve hung blinds up in my house and that took two years.

But, her song resonates with me and I want to include it in my Orphan Songs project.  I’ve been fiddling with it and feel like I’ve found what I was looking for.  Hopefully, I can do it justice, particularly this one verse that makes me tear up when I sing it now.

Near the cross, a trembling soul,

love and mercy found me;

there the bright and morning star

sheds its beams around me.  

To imagine what my spirit was like the moment I fell before the cross.  Lost and broken.  Orphaned by sin and separated from God.  And then at my weakest and most desperate Christ came for me, love and mercy found me and it adopted me into it’s family.  Those words really hit me right now.

So, I’m going to post a video of the song.  It’s not how I’m going to go about the song.  Because . . . it’s terrible.



PS.  I’ve spent the better part of the last two days coming to terms with the fact that I’ll never get close to making a song as Otis Redding’s cover of "Try A Little Tenderness” and I’ll never even touch Otis’ voice.  I might even include that video after the jump.